In a political climate where the public is angry and basically uninformed, the President is trying to get re-elected in the face of heavily funded attack ads that have already proven, to be full of lies and half-truths; ads that falsely state his position and exaggerate the potential of his opponent and what he claims he can do for an injured country. What’s a man to do?
How about a little clarity, some refreshing transparency, a look at what he expects to do in a next term. How about he lays out a clear and precise plan for where he wants the country to go and how he plans, in the next four years, to get it there. That alone, if it makes sense, will get him elected, mainly because his opponent seems to have no plan at al, no concept of what he will do except take up space in the White House.
In order for people to understand any potential plan for the country, they must be made aware of the history of the last twenty years and how it has affected the last four, so he must provide a concise history of those past years and show how they landed us where we are today.
I say that this history is important to Obama’s plan because by it, he will be able to show that Romney’s already flawed economic blueprint for where he will take the country, is just a rerun of the plan that almost destroyed us.
He must thoroughly explain that the Romney/Ryan economic policy will lead the country directly into a rerun of what we have just experienced, manly because it is the same plan as that followed by the Bush administration. Then he must create a contrasting blueprint of what he wants to do and how he plans to do it. Even more important he must emphasize to the American voters that he will need their help to accomplish his goals, he must make them partners in his plan. He must make it clear that he cannot accomplish his plan without tools, tools that only they can provide. Those tools are congressional votes, votes that only the people can give him by voting the right candidates into office. He must show that when he had the tools, in the first two years of his presidency, he passed more important legislation than any previous president in his first two years. Then after the 2010 election, the people shut him down by electing a hostile House and a senate that was short of the sixty-vote minimum, necessary to pass legislation over filibuster.
In order to form this partnership with the voters, Obama’s platform must include things that the people need and things that the people want. He must double down on what he started and didn’t accomplish by calling for a new Stimulus based on the fact that the first one kept the country alive when it was most needed, by providing the extra funds to cover the unemployment mess created by the Bush administration. He must make people understand that his Stimulus saved over a million jobs by keeping the auto industry alive and if it hadn’t been underfunded it would have had a chance to create many hundreds of thousands more jobs through the funding of infrastructure projects that are badly needed and would employ the kind of worker who can no longer find a job.
He must clearly explain, which he has failed to do thus far, how Obamacare is the answer to healthcare in this country; that it was, in the past, a Republican plan that has only fallen out of favor with the right because, it is now championed by a black man in the White House. He must push for single payer or across state border insurance sales and he must fight for limited tort reform.
He must show that contrary to Republican dogma the Federal government has shrunk by almost a million jobs since he took office, but that now, in order to create salaries that will stimulate product demand it must be revitalized and that, not just for economic reasons, we must hire more teachers, firemen and police, and we must take back the prison system from private hands that are bilking the government and creating, rather than incarcerating, criminals.
He must address the useless electoral college that flaunts the one man, one vote principal, outline a new immigration policy, that is national in concept and aimed at finding a way to realistically deal with the 13 million illegal aliens that are currently US residents of our country. He must initiate a new tax policy that will lower base corporate tax rates while eliminating their perks and unneeded deductions and will also lower middle class rates while raising, somewhat, high income rates, he must address the national debt and how it relates directly to defense spending and much more. This is not an easy job but it must be done, mainly because it hasn’t been done for eleven and a half years.
If it isn’t accomplished the President will surely lose a large portion of the independent vote, a vote he must have to retain the White House. To accomplish his aim, however, he must lay out an honest policy and he must make the voters understand that no policy can be accomplished without the help of congress, and that the last year and a half and their own statements, make it abundantly clear that the Republicans don’t want to help the country, they just want to get rid of him.
This is the message that has to be crystal clear if Obama is to retain the White House. This country needs a president who will fight for all its people, not just the rich ones, and he is going to need a partnership with all those people if he is going to be able to help them.